Finance

Twitter went aflutter this week with late-breaking (two years late) news in Smithsonian Magazine that Australian physicist Graham Turner had compared the findings of the landmark Limits to Growth report to actual recorded data from 1972-2000 and the Limits to Growth model held up remarkably well.  Turner’s report, titled “A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality,” finds that in all five of the key global economic subsystems - population, food production, industrial production, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable natural resources - the Limits to Growth standard run scenario (essentially business as usual) looks uncannily similar to the actual data, whereas the other two scenarios - stablizing behavior and policies, and comprehensive use of technology - do not.

I was honored to join Majora Carter, Eban Goodstein, and Elysa Hammond at the launch of Bard College's new MBA in Sustainability last week to discuss how finance has been a major factor driving our ecological and social crises and how fixing finance must be a part of the solution.  The ideas I presented - an all hands on deck, bottom-up and top-down/systemic approach to sustainable finance - are at the core of a new finance curriculum the Capital Institute is helping Bard design.  Below are the slides from my address.  For more information on the MBA in Sustainability program, visit http://www.bard.edu/mba/.